Debunking Mystiques: Indigenous People

Wow, apparently talking about sex inspires comments — who’d have thunk it? On the subject of social norms (and mystiques), indigenous people are also under a mystique — the idea of the noble savage. This is just not true, and every instance of supposedly great features of the Noble Savage have glaring counterexamples (see this book by Steven Pinker for more). Indigenous people are meant to be:

peaceful — definitely false. Any indigenous society studied by anthropologists has a murder rate that exceeds the most violent cities by several orders of magnitude (a factor of over 100). See this summary of Pinker’s talk.

sexually uninhibited — counterexamples with practices we can only describe as abhorrent are plentiful. See this interesting case (had a “complaint” about my graphic imagery in the celibacy post so leaving this one in the link..!)

egalitarian — even if we forget about forced circumcision, sexual inequality etc, there are more unusual practices that are enough to get the police in. In this talk a National Geographic journalist describes the “wonderful world” of indigenous people and tells of a tribe in Columbia who train children-destined-to-become-elders from the age of 3 to 18 in caves under glaciers. They’re instructed in the tribal lore without ever leaving the caves. They only see natural light/the outside world when they turn 18. He was raving about what an amazing experience this was instead of reporting this to the authorities as child abuse — I couldn’t believe it!

wise — again this might be true in many cases but there’s a problem. Someone who says all indigenous people are wise seems to be saying they are wise almost as a matter of definition. Wisdom might then be considered the property of those who are not literate, which isn’t of itself very wise.

So what does this all mean?

Political correctness and relativism mean almost no criticism of a tribal culture is possible. I saw this episode of Tribe where the host visits a Kenyan tribe involved in constant killings with neighbouring tribes (all armed with kalashnikovs) — no indication that this might not be the best state for them to be in. Of course there’s no point moralising in a documentary and repeating “violence is bad” a la Mr Mackey from Southpark, but still, judgement seems virtually suspended in modern contexts.

This is of course bullshit — tribal life is brutal, unjust and as “unnatural” as urban life.

Of course this doesn’t deny the genocides that have occurred. In fact cultural obliteration is far-reaching: of the 6000 languages spoken today, 50% are expected to go extinct soon. But it doesn’t help to romanticise indigenous people out of some misguided universal respect (or the commendable desire not to be imperialist).

Is all modernisation good for tribal people? No, simply because most of the time it’s been applied in a thoughtless evil manner.

BUT is some form of modernisation a form of — I dare say it — progress? Absolutely. More people change from “pure” tribal lifestyles to “decadent” urban living than vice versa — because there is something essential about urban living.

There is much that’s lamentable about the disappearance of certain indigenous ways of life. But not everything is lamentable just ‘cos it’s gone. Human beings aren’t mere inhabitants of cultural zoos for us to visit and marvel at their pristineness (denying them the fridge, car, house etc that WE have) — and that’s what the relativists seem to be saying.

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“[T]ribal life is brutal, unjust and as “unnatural” as urban life.” – what do you mean by “unnatural”? What are you suggesting is “natural”?

“More people change from “pure” tribal lifestyles to “decadent” urban living than vice versa — because there is something essential about urban living.” – I disagree. Just because one trend is more common than another, doesn’t mean that it’s “good” or “right”; and I don’t see how the trend towards urban living demonstrates anything “essential” about it.

i was only mocking the idea some people have that tribal life is more “natural” — of course natural/unnatural are ideas that have no meaning and were invented by talking heads

as for the change to urban life i wasn’t saying it’s good because lots of people are doing it. of course from a purely logical view it doesn’t show anything — but it definitely dispels the notion of tribal living as very enjoyable or idyllic. (should have been clearer on what i meant by essential — will do this in a post about progress coming soon to a computer screen near you)

And of course for every example of an indigenous person going urban (not that they’re ever forced into it by their land being stolen, oh no, it’s always “free choice”), there’s another example of an indigenous person saying the equivalent of, “Why are you fools adopting farm and city life when there’s free food everywhere for the picking up?”

I actually ran across a guy recently who said, apparently with a straight face (it was an online opinion piece, so I couldn’t see him, of course), that the Inuit used to experience famine. Sorry, no. Famine is a phenomenon strictly of farming. Did the Inuit ever face a food shortage? Sure, every culture does once in a while. But the thing about being a hunter-gatherer is that if one food source fails you can move on to the next one. The fact they lasted so long with no “collapse” like, say, the Roman Empire or ancient Israel experienced should tell you something.

It’s like the difference between poor drifters and rich bankers. Look at what happens to a rich banker when his business collapses. He has no idea what to do with himself when the money runs out. The poor drifter, however, has experience with a wider array of job types and can always move to another town because he owns nothing that holds him back.

Would I want to be a poor drifter? Depends on what my goals might be. Sure, lots of things about the lifestyle suck. Gotcha. On the other hand, if my goal is survival, it might be a more intelligent choice to hunt and gather as I go, rather than pin all my hopes on one crop with locusts on the horizon.

Put another way, I know you’re an atheist (and how does that work, anyway, being an atheist Jew–that should be an oxymoron!), but you’re familiar with Cain and Abel–which one did G-d favor? Which lifestyle did G-d favor later for His chosen people–big cities and kings, or small encampments and priests?

Ultimately, which lifestyle has lasted the longest with the least negative impact on the biosphere? I mean, to suggest the biosphere doesn’t matter is to suggest to a man on life support that he should throw a big raucous party and wreck his respirator just ’cause he feels like it and never mind the consequences.

Not that I’m not totally with you about the way some domesticated people put the wild ones on a pedestal. Especially with their belief that indigenous people are these wimpy, passive, enlightened children of Aquarius or some such B.S. But then it amazes me that with all their talk about tolerance and pluralism and stuff, these people have so much in common with the well-meaning Christian missionaries who thought that all indigenous people were mindless brutes and savages with no inherent right to their own languages, customs, or territories.

And it bleeds into their interaction with religious people generally, condemning anyone with strongly held moral values or beliefs as “intolerant.” I’m sure you do the same thing. Culture, however, is a substitute for instinct in most cases, and carries the same subconscious imperative. Those who have become “progressed” and “enlightened” enough to ignore any cultural conditioning whatsoever are disabled, not improved. What are you going to do if civilization ever collapses? All your values center around things too easily destroyed. You’re living in a house of cards.

While plenty of romanticizing has gone on, certain of your “facts” are equally false. I won’t fill up the comments with a bunch of quotes from my papers on indigenous people, but suffice it to say that many of the examples you seem to make reference to are considered extreme cases; they’re a handful of cultures pushed to the edges of their former land, or in harsh environments, or living through what is essentially a cultural apocalypse.

One must also consider that just because the violence in the cities is supposedly lower per capita (which is just patently untrue) does not mean that our culture as a whole is. We export our violence out to the poor of other countries, or onto people who happen to have “our” resources in their land, all to maintain our idiotic lifestyle. If we counted that, each American is responsible for at least a few killings each. There are also the numbers of people killed by police each day, not considered murders. Between 4 and 6 Americans die each day because of encounters with police.

Other deaths may or may not be counted as “violent”, but need to be considered in any meaningful discussion on this topic. For instance, 30,000+ people killed each year by automobiles required to keep this sort of lifestyle going.

Also, research Dunbar’s number. Again, I won’t fill up more of your space describing it, since others have very well.

Also also, one bird species accidentally hunted to extinction is nothing compared to a culture destroying roughly 200 species a day. Animals occasionally go extinct (or more often mutate into something else) in natural cycles, but not at the rate we’re pushing.

So no, indigenous life isn’t perfect. Of course it isn’t, it involves humans, and nothing that involves humans will ever be. But in many, many ways, indigenous living is healthier and more psychologically appropriate for humans than “civilized” living (that is, in cultures characterized by the formation of cities). For a pretty good academic analysis, see http://www.anthropik.com/anthropik/thirty/index.html. The author takes an obviously pro-indigenous stance, but is realistic in the facts and doesn’t let that blind him to the less pleasant aspects of some indigenous cultures.

1. Papers — do you have links to your papers online? I’d be interested in reading or at least having a look.
2. False facts — not sure you’re disputing any specific facts from my examples? You say they are extreme and I agree they’re probably the strongest ones I could find — but I think this underscores that romanticisation is false. For instance I don’t try to say that tribal cultures are LESS environmentally friendly than our culture since that’s obviously false.
3. Violence number — is there any evidence that tribal cultures have a systematically lower rate of violence and the cases I cited are just outliers? Pinker’s chapter in The Blank Slate went against that — do you claim he misinterpreted the studies he cited or that they were flawed?
4. 1st vs 3rd world — looking at the reported stats [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_intentional_homicide_rate] there are plenty of 3rd world countries with a very low murder rate eg. Tunisia. I don’t think you’d say they have a tribal lifestyle — and yet would you say they’re exporting their farming-based violence somewhere else? Where?
5. Other forms of violence — if you compare “healthy” living and count automobile accidents against non-tribal life — a reasonable assessment — then most cases of tribal life would get thrashed on life expectancy and death from basic preventable diseases in a way that would trump the other forms of death in non-tribal lifestyles.
6. Environmental damage — my claim is that tribal people don’t automatically have some magical awareness and concern for the environment: neither do we. To the extent that they can destroy species by overhunting they will often do it. As will we — but our ability to do so has been orders of magnitude greater.

Dana — I agree that the mere fact that people might move to the city doesn’t show much, I didn’t develop this part very clearly. What I mean is that if people who experience both kinds of life choose non-tribal life, this would mean that it fulfils certain desires which then cannot be denied in the way it’s done by those who romanticise tribal life. Now of course you can say that nobody’s experienced both lifestyles in a “fair” test without already being used to their native lifestyle — or you can claim that most people WOULD choose a tribal lifestyle. This would then be an empirical question and I admit I don’t have access to reasonable data so it was a hunch.

For famines are you saying people were always able to follow the herds to where they were plentiful? This seems a bit implausible: if you’re farming you’re at the mercy of one type of environment, if you’re hunting and gathering you’re at the mercy of another. It seems that both will lead to to famines on occasion and I’m not sure of any data about which one has more famine. Although archaeology suggests that at the time people first started farming the farmers were worse off (see Guns Germs and Steel)

In terms of atheist Jew I’m a Jew in terms of ethnic background. Of course even assuming the Bible is an inerrant book, in it God certainly does NOT advocate tribalism. All the characters are farmers including Cain and Abel. I can’t think of any prohibitions that would go against large city life. In Deuteronomy the rules for a king are layed out — and in the other books of the Torah there are commandments to establish a capital, to congregate there thrice a yr etc. So I’d say God is definitely a non-tribalist and prefers farming and encampments without set boundaries on population.

In terms of which lifestyle has done the most damage — not sure who you’re arguing against? Also what did you mean by you being sure I do the same thing — condemn someone with strong values as intolerant? And what do the people who talk about pluralism (even if according to you they take it too far) have in common with Christian missionaries?

I don’t have my papers online, sadly, though I am working on a number of articles and possibly starting my own blog.

I probably should have chosen my wording better. It would be better to say that the facts presented a false conclusion, an incorrect impression of the typical nature of tribal peoples.

There is plenty of evidence that typically, going back into “prehistory” (meaning not the history of our people, really) not to mention non-anthropological but still credible accounts of early-contact with American Indians, that there was little internal violence, and not even that much between groups. Burial remains also show a lower rate of violence, but of course burial remains are never definitive. More importantly is the form that foraging peoples “warfare” takes; it’s really more of a pageant for many peoples worldwide, and often they’d call it a day if anyone was even hurt. Not that they wouldn’t kill one another at other times, but there was no wholesale killing as in civilized warfare.

In reference to Pinker, I’d say he’s a psychologist trying to play anthropologist, and having studied both (almost double-majored in college, but didn’t end up with a respect for the institution of psychology) I’ve noticed a distinct strain of ethnocentrism and outright racism against indigenous people in mainstream psychology. Clearly, he’s taking highly selective examples to prove his incorrect assertion.

I’ll admit to knowing little about Tunisia, so I won’t pretend to.

Again going to the burial remains and accounts, it’s untrue that the life expectancies are shorter for tribal peoples. For much of the millions of years of human history, life expectancy was roughly what white first-worlders enjoy now, and it should be noted that it was high for everyone, not just the elite like we have now. Diseases, also, weren’t all that much of an issue. Most of our worst diseases sprung from the domestication of animals, and poor health resulting from grain based diets. With better nutrition and no flu or plague, health issues were not major. Cancer, in fact, is a product of agricultural lifestyles.

Tribal peoples will not OFTEN overhunt, and in fact only that Maori example (on a small island) has that ever been recorded. Don’t buy any of the Overkill theory BS, it’s bogus. Indigenous populations have almost always shown to have positive impacts on the populations of animals they rely on. That’s just part of smart cultural evolution. Indigenous people might not magically have a connection to the land, but they do develop some sort of connection and extremely deep understanding as part of their cultural learning.

As for the famine stuff, no, hunting and foraging peoples do not have real famines. Not that there aren’t lean times, but no real famines. This is a simple reality of not relying on a few closely related species for food; there’s always something else to find to eat, even if it isn’t your favorite animal or plant.

Let me know if you do start a blog and get some of this material online, I’d be glad to check it out. Just a few points to clarify:

In the Tunisia example I meant to point out that rates of violence in different countries don’t seem to be correlated with their economic wealth (or whether they’re “1st or 3rd world”) at all, which I think goes against the idea of the 1st world “exporting” violence to the 3rd world to the extent that peace in one country is necessarily balanced by more violence in another.

Of course the idea was not that “all” tribal cultures are violent, bad for the environment etc but “some”. Or more precisely “not none”. So I don’t think even if there was data showing a lower trend it would go against what I’m saying. That said, I haven’t seen any good comparative data.

The statements on life expectancy and cancer so overwhelmingly go against everything that I have ever read — what are your references?

[…] experience reality as it is — never a bad thing methinks. Without fostering some false noble savage mythology, ’twill do us all some good to become more mindful of what’s involved in eating meat. I […]